Monday, November 18, 2013

In the reaching out...

The computer world is odd to me.
I don't understand what people post,
what goes for truth or promo any more
because the world is changing and I am
from another time. That's part of it.
But I do know what I am touched,
moved. And when I do something
about it... because that is unusual.

Two days ago, I read an article put up
on the Huffington Post about a young
man busted for a crime- he was set up-
further complicating a young gay life
already complicated by being given up
at birth.

He was raised with two gay parents
and they loved him but, like all teens,
he ran wild and one thing led to another.
It ended with him being incarcerated.
after meeting an older man with a stolen
credit card, who got him to use it. So...
the next stop was jail for what sounds
like a young pretty wispy blond boy.

God knows what happened there.
He got transferred from one hole
to another, got HIV along the way
and will be out in two years when
he will then be twenty five, without
any school, job, home, money, solid
friends or future unless people help.

The writing was so beautiful, I was
touched. I wrote the author and told
him his prose moved me, that I would
get the lad a coat when he gets out.
He was grateful. I thought that was all
there was to it until, through a totally
different direction, I found out that
this man whose writing I llike was
also very active in ACT UP in NYC
and I am looking for someone to write
a chapter about that in my anthology.
So I wrote back to invite him to join.

Isn;t that stramge? I read a piece that
moved me and felt motivated to do
something kind for someone lonely
and abused by life and by the system.
And it led me to a writer who may be
able or willing to collaborate in my art.
But all this was an accident brought
abiuyt by the Huffinton Post and by
getting out of a comfort zone and, put
simply, giving with no sense of reward,
but then seeing it come back to you,
potentially. And if not, not.

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About Me

Adrian Brooks has been a social and political activist,
poet, performer and writer since the 1960s. His fiction includes: The Glass
Arcade (1980) and satirical novels from Suspect Thoughts Press: Roulette (2007)
and Black and White and Red All Over (2009). Non fiction includes his memoir-
'Flights of Angels' (2008)- about his years as a star and writer in the
legendary free theater of gay liberation- The Angels of Light. Brooks
lives in San Francisco. In June 2015, Cleis Press published his anthology: The Right Side of History, 100 Years of LGBTQI Activism.